Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

Old crap strikes again

One of the power supply fans on my ancient Compaq DL320 server is starting to become noisy. First, I can’t complain…this server is really old. I acquired it when my previous employer did a big server upgrade for another company. This thing came back on the stack. It was all bashed up, had been left [...]

May 29, 2009 · agw · One Comment
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Linux, Technical

HPT-366, breakage workaround

Looks like I have been able to get around the issues with the HPT-366 chipset. I have a filesystem reorg (xfs_fsr) going on with the system, heavy drive activity, and no timeouts or bus resets. The solution was to turn everything on, including DMA and write cache, but explicitly disabling interrupt unmask. Now with all [...]

May 24, 2009 · agw · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Linux, Technical

HPT-366 chipset suuuucks

Well maybe that’s not fair. It’s possibly the entire motherboard that sucks, but I’m leaning towards just the ol’ HPT-366 silicon. Also, this is ancient technology to most people…but around here there’s nothing wrong with that. The chipset is embedded on an Abit BE6-II motherboard. This is back when Abit was both still in business [...]

May 9, 2009 · agw · One Comment
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Linux

It’s back!

After much delay, I finally got my ass in gear and rebuilt my dual-head Linux setup. For months now I’ve been using my XP64 “game machine” as my primary machine for everything – gaming, work, internet, etc. Before I moved I used my Linux workstation for virtually everything except gaming. It’s been a while but [...]

April 28, 2009 · agw · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Linux

VDPAU makes old machines new again

Back before the old blog got blown away by my stupendous backup skills, or lack thereof, there were several posts detailing the difficulty in getting my HTPC to play HD video smoothly. Sometimes it could do 720p, but it never could do 1080p without dropping frames, audio out of sync, etc. The machine has a [...]

April 19, 2009 · agw · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Linux

RAAAAIIIIID? (disk failures)

I’m sitting here with two dead hard drives on my desk. One 250GB SATA drive, one 160GB, both Seagate. The 250GB drive is a little over two years old, the 160GB a bit over a year old. The point I’d like to make isn’t that “Seagate sucks” – drives fail. I buy Seagate drives for [...]

April 16, 2009 · agw · 4 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Linux, Technical

VCP exam passed

Well, after much procrastination — something I excel at, I took the course in October of last year — I’ve taken and passed the VCP 310 exam. Not exactly instructor-grade results, nine points over the minimum score at 79, but I’ll take it. It’s nice to have that off the slate of things to do. [...]

March 31, 2009 · agw · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Linux IT

Inadvertently, a fresh start

So I moved in September 2008.   This blog had a fair number of posts, then – nothing especially interesting, but a few years of stuff I had written.  A couple comments.  Well no more of that :-)  I had set up Amanda to back up the dinky little web server hosting a few things of [...]

February 12, 2009 · agw · No Comments
Posted in: Linux